"Everyone and their dog has an opinion on if the Dreamcast pad is any good or not, however today saw a potential actual contender arrive for the much aged original Sega Dreamcast design. So if you do happen to either not be a fan, or just fancy a change after all these years, then more options are emerging in this field.

Retro Fighters, the LA team that has previously successfully Kickstarted and delivered pad designs for the NES and the N64, today launched and then achieved the £10,000 goal they had set for delivery of the project for a new DC pad, that will fully support VMU and rumble too.

Hitting that goal within a couple of hours and already completed by the time we'd even spotted the announcement. At UK exchange rates the pad is weighing in at about £33 before postage, or 43 of your finest USDs to those not lucky enough to come from Isle of rain and misery. And the project is currently listed with a September 2019 delivery, meaning you could be using the pad by the end of the year if all goes to plan.

The Kickstarter details lots of the technical side of the teams work for those interested in knowing more, including how they struggled to find any form of compatible components that already exist anywhere. So the cost of the product is covering the R&D of the controller boards and VMU compatibility, that the team themselves have had to completely design. The page also has some demos of the boards actually controlling a bit of Powerstone for those that might like to see the actuality of the product before throwing your money down.

Check the kickstarter out here and let us know in the comments if you've backed, or what your thoughts are."

The Kickstarter cites the usefulness of high shoulder triggers as a convenience for fighting games. Yet, the Dreamcast already has quite "modern" solutions for arcade gameplay. If people want to play Fighters and Shmups, the DC has native arcade sticks, and controller adapters for everything under the sun.

The glaring and obvious gap in the Dreamcast controller's layout has never been its shoulder button style. Anyone who has spent any time on the Dreamcast playing Quake III Arena, Outtrigger, Half-Life, UT, Soldier of Fortune (loading...), Quake 1/2 and Doom Homebrew knows the Dreamcast controller's shortcomings: movement + looking in first person oriented titles

Even if you can get used to aiming with the left analog, the face buttons are simply spaced way to far apart to double as a d-pad on the right side. Making movement in Quake 3 far less than ideal. This issue is so evident that Outtrigger has alternative controller options where you hold the controller UPSIDE DOWN in order to gain access to a right-side aiming analog stick. This is insane, but its exists. Go try it.

(Obviously the DC supports Mouse and Keyboard, which I prefer and use, but lets just say for sake of arguement the Mouse/KB setup is tricky in most couch type settings.)

The controller in question at the Kickstarter should have a second analog stick on the adjacent side of the existing d-pad, with a switch to toggle between 3 combination modes:

10x the asking goal, and 100K+ total in raised cash makes this a missed opportunity for the holy grail of Dreamcast controllers. Why not instead of shipping "stickers" to backers as the stretch goal for 100K, scrap the existing PCB and add this tweak instead? Just saying.

I can guarantee existing backers wanting 1 controller with the current design would want 2 for splitscreen fragging if this analog stick tweak were implimented.